We as web developers sometimes take our knowledge for granted and forget that not everyone knows that there are browsers out there that aren’t our old nemesis, Internet Explorer. We forget that most people that come to us for development most likely grew up without the internet and never had the need to look further than good ol’ Internet Explorer (IE for short). Thus it is our job to educate them instead of looking down on them.

This post will serve as that, an introduction to browsers, how to make sure you’re getting the best experience out of them and a brief explanation of why Internet Explorer is the enemy.

As part of our quotation process for larger web based systems and sites we, like most decent developers, make use of Wireframes and Specification Documents (Spec Docs) after delivering our initial ball-park quote, to plan the entire system before delivering an in-depth quotation. After all, the five P’s taught us that “Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance” and we tend to believe that. However, clients do not always understand WHY they need wireframes and a spec doc, and especially WHY they need to pay for these items. Hopefully this post will help clarify those WHY’s and turn them into AYE’s.Read More…

Welcome back to HTML Bootcamp, recruit. Today we will be covering editing environments, setting up your very first HTML document and testing it in a web browser. So let’s not waste any time and get down to business!

1. Editors

When you’re on the battlefield you need to be comfortable with your equipment and know how to use it. If your helmet is too big for you or your rifle’s strap is broken you’re not really performing the way you should. The same principal applies to coding. If your editing environment causes you more headaches than anything else you’re not really performing at maximum capacity. So making the right choice when it comes to which editor you use is not something to be taken lightly.

Initially you might be able to get away with using your operating system’s standard text editor, like Notepad on Microsoft Windows, but later you’ll want to pick the right tools to make your job easier. When you reach that point you can go one of two routes.

Disclaimer

As a courtesy, Anvil Studios is going to offer an in-depth course in the basics of web development. This course will be presented through posts on our blog. This is going to be a N00b friendly course. So if you are already well-oiled in web development, we advise you to turn to more solid food, found in some of our other articles and series.

Welcome to Bootcamp

Welcome to Web Development Bootcamp. During the course of this series we will teach you everything you need to know to develop a fully functional and standards compliant website or web-based application.

Websites can be broken up into two main parts, Client- and Server-side. The Client-side is mostly responsible for display and user interactivity while the majority of logic and functionality is managed by the Server-side. These two parts can then be broken down further into the languages responsible for them and their functions.Read More…

I was building database tables for a project and came across a problem that I’ve tried to ignore in the past: When I have a main table, a second table, and a table linking the two, and the link-table can link a single record in the main table with multiple records in the second table, doing a join would return multiple rows for a single entry in my main table — a row for each link between the main and second tables. But I wanted to retrieve the data in such a way that only a single row is returned for each row in the main table, which contains all the data from the second table. A mouth-full, I know! Keep reading to see examples as well as the answer I’ve found.

Part of doing Web Development is staying on top of your game and up to date with all the new techniques and technologies constantly coming out. Currently, the most prominent of these new toys are HTML5 and CSS3. In this series I’m going to be doing an overview of HTML5: What you can use now, what you should hold back on, and what you can do with it.

Part 1 will cover the structure of your html documents when switching from html4/xhtml to html5.

In our company I’ve become the unofficial “Framework Tester Guy”, because I always seem to be the one working on the latest version of our internal framework. Recently I decided to try out an established framework to develop a little personal project of mine. I picked cakephp for several reason.

I run Windows 7 on my home system and I couldn’t find a nice quick guide on setting up the cakephp console on windows 7 in a text format. Sure, there are screencasts, but sometimes having nice step by step text instructions is just easier, especially when your internet connection is acting up a bit and you can’t stream effectively (like when you stay in South Africa). So here are some quick and easy steps to set up the cakephp console in windows 7 on a WAMP server.

Up until the introduction of CSS3 if you wanted to display your text in a circle you had to be creative using images or other techniques. The implementation of CSS3 has changed that and you can now transform your <div> into a nice round object.

I was playing around with some of the CSS3 features that are already supported by the modern browsers (Note: The techniques I’m going to be covering here are not yet supported by IE) and I thought to myself. Hell, I have all the tools to make a round <div> at my disposal, so why not do it.

Recently I was playing around on my sandbox personal site with some ideas to dynamically move and position elements relative to on screen clicks in ways that are compatible with different browsers and different resolutions. The scripts I used to do this were then implemented by a fellow developer on a client’s site to solve a problem with having a customized pop-up div displaying at the correct location when clicking.

Note: Majority of the code was copied from several sources and thrown together and then modified to solve the problem. This is also done without the use of JQuery.

The process can be broken down into several steps.

Find out which browser is being used and find the size of the client’s window.